As a driver, I also hate when the view strays away from the full field shot. With the bad visibility on the field for the past few years (especially last year), being able to look up at the screen and see your robot from above is extremely valuable. It got me out of many situations where I lost sight of where the robot was behind the airship, or if I was stuck on a boulder behind the drawbridge.
Use quad view then, I open that up for most of the streams I watch I find that works pretty well. I know not all streams have that but most do.
This is fiction. There is no way any AV crew can keep track of all of the important action in a game of Power Up with a single camera. I don’t care how much training a crew has. There are important actions happening at different locations on the field simultaneously.
I would argue that for somebody to even be able to follow this game, they need to be able to track all of the action. If you don’t see team XXXX score 3 Cubes in the Switch, you’ll be asking yourself why Red’s score stopped counting up. This problem would be more of an issue for people with only a basic knowledge of the game. On the other hand, if you can see the Switch change sides and also see the score stop, you can make that connection.
As with most things in FIRST, Canada does its own thing. WatchFIRSTNow is responsible for all streaming north of the border.
Their setup is fairly consistent: one stationary full-field camera and one ground- level camera on a tripod operated by a camera-person (for team introductions, alliance selection, and of course, close-up shots during matches).
Some things WFN do are awesome, like their huge archive of individual matches for most events from the last few years. They key word there is most. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, some events are completely missing. Usually, the raw video is not made public after the streams end, so we have to cross our fingers and hope the individual matches will be posted to the website.
This is in no way a criticism of the awesome volunteers who spend a ton of their personal time running WFN behind the scenes, I just wish Canada would come into alignment with the rest of FIRST. Twitch and YouTube are much more accessible and useful than Livestream and Vimeo.
As a GA, we’re taught to address the audience in the arena, rather than online viewers. Thus, when I call a match, I watch the entire field looking for relevant things to talk about, rather than the camera deciding for me.
As a viewer, I definitely share your frustrations. When it comes to that aspect broadcasting, FIRST falls short compared to most sports. In my perfect world (assuming we keep the multiple cameras), the Game Announcer’s commentary would direct the camera movements.
I suggest you read the FRC Blog.
In 2017, FIRST had streaming equipment on 2 trucks, serving 11 events. That was a pilot of their stream solution. This year, they expanded to 7 trucks covering 40 events, or 75% of the regionals in the US. Any way you slice it, that’s a huge increase. If they do a similar increase and expand to 13 trucks next year, I expect they’ll have all of the regionals covered. What about districts? I would have to see the contract FIRST has with each district to be sure, but I would guess each district needs to deploy its own unified streaming solution, they won’t get one from FIRST. I would love to be wrong about that, having a unified solution across all of FIRST would be awesome.
I also feel for the teams that volunteer to run the webcast for an event. They put their energy into managing the stream during the event, and then have to spend hours and hours back at the school cutting up the video into individual matches so they can get posted to YouTube and TBA.
Oh, and for Lake Superior… it looks like they’ve all been uploaded to youtube (although I haven’t verified that none were missed). https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx_nxv3OgJ-043DF5qdcu3NpiAxwOjXYV
They just haven’t made their way onto TBA yet.
Yeah I’ve read that blog post and I’m happy with the direction FIRST is going. This thread is mostly just a “I see what you’re doing and where you’re going and I like it, so please keep doing it”. I would hate for somebody to make a decision that stunts the expansion of trucks for 2019 because they weren’t sure how the community felt about them. The 45 posts in this thread over the last day has hopefully reinforced that the direction they’re going is the right one.
I also believe that each district has their own AV setup. But being from Minnesota… we are at the mercy of FIRST in this department for the foreseeable future (which is seemingly not a bad place to be on this issue).
Let me also reiterate that I appreciate the heck out of the teams that put the time and effort into running the livestreams at an event. This thread is in no way a dig at those teams. I’m excited for next year when there’s a standard in place across all FIRST Regionals.
Edit: After looking at some of the videos that have been uploaded to YouTube, some are 22 seconds long, others show the same screen for a majority of the match among other issues. I believe some of these issues resulted from faulty venue WiFi. Another thing that will hopefully be fixed next year!
And they switch back and forth willy nilly making it virtually impossible to know what’s going on. Sorry, Canada, I love your teams and your events but I’d really like you to have a full field option for those of us who get motion sickness.
AV Crews dont only have one camera though. They have multiple across the field, with one or two doing most of the controlling and switching behind the scenes with an array of views. The one(s) in control needs to have a good understanding of the game to be able to do this job effectively though.
Totally agreed when they do have access to more than 1 camera. Having somebody who knows the game behind the camera is really important. When they have more than 1 camera, 1 view should be a static full field view and the other(s) can run action shots. When you have 4 cameras all running action shots and you rapidly switch between them it’s unwatchable.
Agreed. I just dont like the idea of only a full field view if possible. its a great way to teach people about production.
While I definitely prefer a full field view, there’s definitely things I think you can miss from not having an up-close shot. I’ll agree, the duration the cameras are left to specific robots is definitely annoying. Whenever I’m watching events online I prefer to have both up-close shots and the full field view just so I get better context, but that’s not exactly the best for live streams and uploads for the range of viewers. I understand that the action shots both give interest to non-scouters and reminds me of sport action shots, but it’d be nice to have scouter-friendly videos.
As someone who sets up FIRST Mid-Atlantic’s video system, operating with full field only makes everyone’s lives easier! From a staffing viewpoint, once it is set up, we can walk away from it. One less person at the already overcrowded scoring table. Sometimes we just have the event manager or one of their assistants operate it as needed. Our FTAs, FTAAs, field supervisors, scorekeepers, etc. all know how to use the system so if something needs to be adjusted, they can do it quickly.
In terms of event operation, less is more, especially around the field.
I’ll come at this issue both from the viewpoint of people interested in FRC, and also from casual observers.
First, when I’m watching by myself, I’m watching to learn lessons about game strategy. The full field view is best for this. Occasionally, I’m watching because I want to see how a particular robot performs. The full field view is best for this, too. If I’m watching live, I avoid streams with lots of switching to close ups and just watch full field video streams, if they are available. Looking to drive me away from watching your event? Show lots of close-ups that cut away from the action I want to watch. I’m not going to waste my time.
On Saturday work days when matches are playing live, our team puts up live video of the matches on a video projector. When matches happen, people gather round to see strategy as well as seeing how all our friends are playing. Full field view is best for this. There’s nothing like hearing a whole room of students screaming angrily at the screen when the view shifts to a closeup view of something nobody cares about. Especially when we can clearly see that other things are more important. Usually we stop watching the feeds with the obnoxious close up views.
Over the years, I have encouraged friends and family to watch the live video feeds. These people range from my nieces and nephews, who I’m trying to get interested in FRC, to my parents, who are genuinely interested in watching my team play. The most consistent feedback I’ve gotten back over the years is that the choppy close up view filled feeds are confusing and unwatchable. I credit the horrible feeds for driving my nieces and nephews away from FIRST. My folks, who are going to be driving many hours to see us play live, refused to watch the livestream of our first competition this year because the feed is so bad.
Based on these personal experiences over the years, I’m firmly in the camp of full field views being better for everyone. I believe the theory that the closeups add excitement is completely incorrect. As currently implemented, the chopped up close up views drive viewers away from the livestreams, rather than attracting them. I’ve observed this to be true of both die hard FRC people and casual viewers alike.
The livestreams have the potential to be such a huge draw for the sport of FRC, and in their current form that potential is squandered. I personally feel that this is a tragedy of epic proportions.
I will say I haven’t seen any close ups of drive teams this year, and that makes me happy.
#teamFullField
There is a better solution for this problem. Last year I volunteered at the St. Joe event for Indiana and wound up helping out AV (if my limited skills count as help) for the event. IndianaFIRST has a pretty awesome setup for streaming, and also, if I remember correctly, they have some simple software tools they use to cut and post match videos to their YouTube channel. I’m pretty sure someone behind the desk just needed to press a button before and after each match, and then they had a separate tool for uploading, but it was great because it trimmed away the time people might otherwise have to spend after the event going through and doing what you describe.
This^
It would be nice if Game Announcers had access to a system akin to the NFL, MLB, NHL, et al… but we are all volunteers and this is a high school sport.
The primary audience are the teams and audience in the arena.
#FullFieldView
I’ll pop in here with a conversation I had with some AV people who had run both of the two Kansas City events (Heartland, than Greater Kansas City three days later). If you look, all of the Heartland match footage is full-field and was absolutely WONDERFUL to look back at to evaluate our performance from last week. However, the stuff this week isn’t. Supposedly, and these are rumors from volunteers over lunch, is that FIRST wants the “main” stream to be the stream that follows the action and jumps back and forth, like this thread is talking, while the Webcast unit (which we have at these events) also streams the quad view. However, the webcast unit is configured (and cannot be changed) to only archive the main webcast view. The simple solution (which we all agreed to be the better solution) was to simply archive both streams. However, there is a contractual obligation somewhere (again, supposedly) that requires only one stream to be archived. I think just about EVERYONE here could be made happy if FIRST simply archived both streams, and honestly, I don’t know why they don’t. They already have the infrastructure to record and display each, just simply save both to disk rather than just one, it would make everyone happy.
?
I agree, and I don’t at the same time. There’s also a lot of points I’d like to cover, and I assume that only OP will really read all of this (lol).
Yes, I like being able to see everything on the field, but at the same time it’s nice to see a close-up view of a bot when they’re doing something useful, resourceful, etc. - Most of the time, though, I’ve noticed that they zoom in on things that are “appealing” but might not be useful to people really watching.
I’ve noticed that some people are saying that the action shots are good for casual viewers, but I’d like to disagree with that as well. My parents, they don’t really understand Power Up very much. They just respect that I really enjoy what I do, so they tuned in to our matches to see how we were doing. They got a better understanding when seeing everything going on, able to find our bot instead of being zoomed in on one bot for 30 seconds and not seeing what we were doing at all.
I’m perfectly fine with the camera zooming in on, let’s say, a team getting a two or three cube scale. My issue comes from the fact that, a lot of times, they zoom in on a bot that does a one cube switch while the other bot is doing a two or three cube scale. You’re left seeing maybe the side of that bot. Even casual viewers would like to see the bot that makes the most impact. Look at American Football, Soccer, Baseball, etc. - They don’t zoom in to the people who aren’t making the biggest impact. In American Football, they’re zoomed in on the ball usually. In Soccer, they’re following the ball as well. In Baseball, they’re following either the person who’s running or the batter. They aren’t zoomed in on someone standing at one of the bases, standing at the outskirts waiting to see if a ball is thrown at them, or waiting for a ball to get kicked toward them. They’re zoomed in on the highest action, and unfortunately it’s there that I feel like webcasts drops the ball (as almost everyone here has said).
I might be doing media production and marketing for our team, but because I’m so close to the field (media pass for LSR) I got a great view of each of our matches and helped out with strategy. That said, stream scouting is terrible and when I was waiting in the pits (watching the matches on the stream or on the TV (depending on what I was doing)) it was really hard or just impossible. When we were back at our hotel talking about strategy, we didn’t even bother viewing matches from the stream. I pulled up the matches on my camera from the SD card and we used that to see how bots were doing. If I didn’t have footage of the match, we’d go off of what we saw if we could.
I completely understand both views and both arguments. Full-view is personally the way I’d like to see it go, but that’s just because if I want to watch one specific bot, I have that choice. If you’re zooming in on something, you’re restricting my eyes. Who cares if I choose I want to watch something boring? I can rewind the stream on Twitch as a VOD after if I need to. I can record the stream on my own end if I’d like as well to re-watch if necessary. Restricting the viewer’s freedom to watch what they’d like is what I feel like drives a lot of casual viewers away.
As I said before, my parents would much rather focus on my bot and our alliance than some bot on the other alliance spinning in circles. They’d rather focus on those on our alliance who’re actually doing “action” than moving to the other side of the field to grab a cube while another bot is battling for scale possession with the other alliance.
tl;dr I feel like having a full-field view would benefit more people than it would hurt. Zooming in over and over is confusing, and allowing viewers to have the freedom to find what they’d like to watch and focus on themselves would be much better than forcing them to see what the directors “feel like” is the biggest point of action.
Twitch deletes their VODs after a few months. Of course, someone from the community could just back up the videos, but an official mirror would be nice.